Eurostar restores services from Ashford

Eurostar has today restored its cross-channel service from Ashford. Hurrah! Long-standing readers will know that I was pretty cross about the new route. Travellers from Surrey and Hampshire, who had been accustomed to switching platforms at Waterloo, were hugely inconvenienced. And Kent, which had made the Ashford link the centrepiece of its development plans, was shockingly let down.

Some irate northerners posted comments to the effect that all I was doing was sticking up for my Home Counties constituents. Too bloody right! My constituents were always going to be Eurostar's main customers. The idea that large numbers of people would travel from, say, Birmingham to Brussels by train was fanciful. People might make the trip once, just for the fun of it. But regular travellers are not going to spend four-and-a-half times the cost of an airfare to make a journey in five hours rather than one-and-a-half.

Eurostar has responded intelligently and sensitively to customer demand. A huge lobbying effort in East Kent has paid off: congratulations to the local councils and to the county council. And congratulations, too, to Eurostar, about whom I've been pretty rude in the past. You see: the market works.